With friends like these... (23.07.06)

I honestly thought I’d heard them all. OK, so I haven’t been in the business all that long, but I’ve been victim to my fair share of actor-y insults – you know the ones: it’s a doss job, you don’t ever do a full day’s work, I could have done it blah blah blah. Most of these don’t faze me too much – mainly because they’re a) patently untrue and b) generally uttered by imbeciles. Friday night, however, took the biscuit.

I was at dinner with friends, and another actor friend and I were talking about work. Or the lack thereof. Boo. Anyway, the assembled company gets drawn in to a whole discussion about contract length, the gist of which being: given the choice, would you rather take a part for life (eg, Mary in Mary Poppins – one character, one show, rather than an on-going developing character in series or soap) or never act again? Other actor and I both said never act again, with very little hesitation, which caused some surprise, but we maintained that acting needs to be kept fresh, and yes, while part of being in a show is doing the same thing over and over again, night after night, doing that for life eventually ceases to be acting so much as going through the motions. There’d be very little art involved, and no challenge whatever. Much uproar ensued: “really, you’d rather never act again?” and, from one of the group: “doing the same thing over and over again? Welcome to the real world”. I responded to the latter with the reasoning that yes, some people do deal with similar issues, processes etc in their day to day jobs, but not to the extent that they’d be doing that job in exactly that way for the rest of their lives. Certainly not to the extent that they’d say exactly the same words to exactly the same people and generate exactly the same responses day after day after day. I mentioned that I had trouble imagining doing a run for 6 months – let alone years and years. I may have slipped off into some sort of reverie – “imagine, every night saying the same thing, doing the same thing” at which point she fixes me with a withering look and says:

“Yes, Tegwen I do know what it’s like being an actress. I did do it for a week and a half”.

Seriously. I almost choked on my sherry.

She was almost redeemed when she phoned up the next morning to apologise though – “I didn’t mean to offend you”. Which would have been fine. Were it not for the fact that she followed that with “I know it’s hard for you at the moment as you’re having trouble finding work. I guess it was a bit of a double whammy”.

Ouch.